Is it safe to come out yet? So the news came out yesterday that Facebook bought Oculus, the company behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, and everyone went crazy. There were demands of refunds from the Kickstarter, and a few well known developers publicly distanced themselves from Oculus.

For some reason, a lot of people took the news pretty badly, and I’m still trying to figure out why. So far, I’ve seen nothing from Oculus which suggest the buyout will change their plans, and they’ve even stated that it won’t. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s what the Rift needed to have any kind of chance of survival. Continue reading →

I’m going to play devil’s advocate here: I don’t see this as a major issue. Firstly, she doesn’t know how to code, but she’s going to go through the process of learning, so she’ll have first hand experience of learning modern coding standards and technologies. Hopefully the process will be similar to, or a replica of, how they intend to teach it in schools, allowing the government to see what works and what doesn’t. Arguably, this process should have happened prior to creating the curriculum, but was obviously rushed through to get it out before election time. Continue reading →

So GoGo-Robot will officially be 5 years old in April this year, so I thought it was a good time to reflect on my past years in the games industry, give an update on what’s been happening with both me and the company and what’s the direction for the future. I’ll point out some helpful tips along the way that I’ve learned and will hopefully be of use to someone. I guess this post is a bit longer than I’d planned, but I enjoyed writing it, so I hope you enjoy reading it. So without further ado, let’s take a look at… Continue reading →

We’ve been working hard on our latest RadiationBurn title, BOOMBA!. The press release went out yesterday, and we’re aiming for a release at the end of April on multiple platforms, including Nintendo 3DS, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Windows Store, Blackberry & Kindle Fire. Stay tuned for more details. We’ll post release dates / how to access it here, on the RadiationBurn Website and on the BOOMBA! Website.

So I finally have a little bit of time after the Christmas rush to finish off our 3 part post on memory management (see Part 1 and Part 2), by looking at garbage collection. So let’s dive in…

Garbage collection is a feature available to a number of programming languages, most notably .NET languages (e.g. C#), Java and Objective-C (though not currently available on iOS). Basically, garbage collection is kind of like, well, real life garbage collection. When you’re finished with something, you discard it, and at some point in the future everything you’ve discarded will get cleaned up by someone else (i.e. The garbage collector). Sounds like a perfect system, right? Just create what you want, discard it when you’re done and not worry about memory management. Unfortunately, a lot of people (myself included) soon come across the pitfalls of this approach, but with a little knowledge you can play nice with the garbage collector. Firstly, we’ll take a look at how garbage collectors generally work, then at some of the problems we can find ourselves in, and finally the solutions…

In part one, we looked at some simple memory management in C, and why we need to be careful with what we do with our memory. Now, we’ll take a look at some more advanced topics, including garbage collectors, reference counting and automatic memory management.

Newton Vs The Horde has been released on WiiWare in North America (Stay tuned for a release date for Europe sometime in February). You can download Newton Vs The Horde by accessing the Wii Shop Channel on your Wii console.
Got a Wii but don’t know how to access WiiWare? Take a look at these helpful sites from Nintendo:Connect your Wii to the internetNintendo WiiWare